Tora no Tsume
by petthekat
Summary: This wasn't worth it. Not for a meal, not for a night out of the cold. Not for a place to sleep or a roof over his head. They had promised him all of these things, and oh, he'd gotten them, the rewards they'd offered in exchange for his silent deference to their instructions. A one-shot telling of TigerClaw's mutation.


Author's Note: So I've been thinking about TigerClaw a lot lately... I find him very interesting. From what I understand, he was once human and was mutated as a child by the Kraang. However, he's an original character for the 2012 series and not a lot is known about him.

So I thought I'd expand on it a bit... Crossposted from my tumblr.

Rating is for disturbing content involving mutation and scientific experimentation.

* * *

This wasn't worth it. Not for a meal, not for a night out of the cold. Not for a place to sleep or a roof over his head. They had promised him all of these things, and oh, he'd gotten them, the rewards they'd offered in exchange for his silent deference to their instructions.

Yes, they had certainly delivered.

A roof made of cool steel, close to his head even though he was so small. A night off the streets, housed instead in a box of bars, an animal's cage. And food - Yes, they'd given him food, more than he'd had in months. It was a meal he had revisited when those horrible injections pushed it all back to the surface in the form of bitter bile.

"I change my mind!" called Tora, his small hands curled tightly around the bars, tears running down his face. "I want out!"

The men with identical faces ignored him, only speaking to each other.

"Phase Two of injections, Kraang."

"Yes, Kraang."

There were others.

He could hear them, all the time, and even if the cage had been comfortable enough to sleep in, the cries of his fellow prisoners chased away any hope of respite, and so he could not even escape in his dreams.

Though, he certainly tried.

He imagined he was playing in a field, a meadow full of flowers, with trees nearby that had just enough branches to climb very high, so he could look into the sky and imagine what it would be like to be up there, as a bird.

He had never known his home, though someone at the shelter had told him it had been very poor, and the fire that took away his parents had been a cleansing sort of measure for the impoverished neighborhood. He didn't know what that could mean, but he did not remember it, as he had been very young. And so he could not find enough knowledge to conjure embarrassment or shame, because it was all lost to him.

And so although he might have tried to imagine, during his awful time in this cage, a place where he might feel comfortable and free, it was difficult. Like sleep, that was plagued with sobs, shivering and distress, because of that night when his parents left and he was taken away, all he could remember was the tears.

Perhaps, Tora told himself, if I was not here, I could be on a playground. He had only known a few playgrounds in his time, as the one at the shelter could hardly be called as such, but he'd had one at school and it was fun. Sometimes, though, when the other children were playing, Tora had to stop, because his stomach hurt and his limbs trembled. He would feel better if he could eat, but that would have to come later. When the shelter served its meals, and not whenever he liked.

He had only been in school for a year. Maybe when he was a little older, he could get a job, and then he could buy food whenever he wanted. Still, he was now only a little boy, and smaller still than even the other little boys. He hated that. If he were bigger, he would not be in this tiny cage.

There was someone in a cage like his, just next to him. He could see the bars and hear the other crying, constantly and worse by the hour, but he could not see them. Tugging his arms around his knees, because his legs could not extend in here, Tora squeezed his eyes shut and tried to think past the nausea, the aches in his muscles. He was used to those things. He could handle them.

His arm hurt where they'd injected him. Over and over again, always the same spot. It hurt even when he didn't touch it, and the skin there looked funny, like he had been pinched very hard. It would get better, he told himself.

His neighbor's crying was louder than normal tonight. He wished they would stop.

"My face!" cried the other voice, sobbing. "My face hurts!"

Tora reached up, folding his fingers into the soft fabric at his neck. A girl had given him this scarf, a girl that was not Japanese but was with a Japanese friend. She had fed him on the street one day, and while he was eating, she had smiled at him and tied this blue scarf around his neck. Her friend spoke words that Tora understood, but it was she who said to Tora, in her strange language, that one day he would grow up to be big and strong. Tora wanted to believe her. He tucked his chin against the scarf.

At least the strange men had not taken that. They did not care what he wore.

But they took his blood, and his skin, and whatever else they cared for. Tora's fingers bled so much, he told them once that he had no more blood, and they should leave him alone. But he always had more, and the strange men knew it.

Oh, how his stomach hurt. It made his knees quiver.

"My face!" yelled out his companion, and Tora heard their cage quiver. The crying grew louder still, broken up by hysterical coughing fits. "It hurts!"

Trembling, Tora leaned as close as he could to his bars, his skinny arm snaking through the bars and trying to wave at the neighbor.

"Are you alright?" he asked, blinking back tears.

Someone shifted next to him, and a pair of hands, paler than his, appeared slowly at the sliver of cage he could see, angled away from him.

Then, as he watched, what had once been a little girl thrust her face between the bars, eyes overly large and yellow, face contorted into a long, sharp beak with veins stretching over the taut skin. The beak turned towards Tora, clicking loudly, a misplaced tongue getting caught and drawing blood.

"My face!" she screeched. "It hurts!"

* * *

Each time they came after that, Tora fought and struggled, scratched and yowled, but the injections continued and grew in frequency. The nausea was constant, the muscle aches excruciating, and even as thin as he was, he could not slip out of the bars, no matter how hard he tried. Blood dripped from his nose and one day, as he sat cowering in the corner of his cage, his mouth took on a sharp, serious pain that had him screaming and writhing.

He coughed violently, blood spraying his cage, and with one great heave, three teeth fell from his mouth. Tora stared in horror, his hands jumping to his mouth, but new teeth had already pushed their way out, teeth that were too sharp and cut his tongue. His gums bled and tingled, and though Tora thrust himself against the wall, crying out to be released, his efforts were in vain.

More teeth were lost, each one more painful than the last, and Tora tried to shove them back in his mouth because he was a confused little boy with no other options, but other teeth were already there. Different teeth.

They hurt. Everything hurt.

"I CHANGE MY MIND!" he screamed, but he could scarcely be heard over the wailing of his fellow prisoners. It was a constant soundtrack of misery that invaded his every thought.

When the skin around his nails began to split, he got on his knees and prayed.

"Save me!" he begged to no one in particular, because he did not know who answered the call of stupid little orphan boys. "Help me!"

The skin burned, ripping at the center and growing wider. New fingernails pushed out his old ones, leaving beds of squishy pink skin while the other slowly took their place. Longer, sharper, thicker. Tora screamed until his breath ran out, and then he collapsed. When he awoke, his hands were covered in blood, and his every tip of his finger was now a long claw.

He used them to scratch his face, his arms, his body. If he was injured, perhaps the strange men would take him out to examine him.

They did examine him, and they took their notes. But they did not take him out of the cage.

One day, the day that robbed him of the last ounce of his humanity, Tora awoke from his half-sleep to a burning in his chest and throat. He clawed again, drawing ribbons of skin from where he marked, desperate for it all to stop, please stop, no more. How much more? It cannot be much. I cannot take it.

Screaming was something he did more often than talking, but the strange men listened to neither. Tora pitched forward, on his hands and knees, his claws curling and grating unpleasantly against the steel floor of his cage. His mouth opened and he bellowed, a high-pitched wail, tears drenching his cheeks. It hurt so much, why?

He knew his own screams, knew them too well, and so when they began to change, his mind panicked and the shouts only grew in volume. Scream louder, Tora. Someone will hear you. They have to hear you. Someone will help you.

His hands snapped to his chest, his claws digging into his ruined shirt, and he tipped his head back to the mere inches he had before ceiling appeared above him. As the last of his screams began to wither under the weight of his breathlessness, they changed, growing deeper and more feral.

"NO!" he wailed, but the word dropped away, disappearing into an savage, beastly roar.


End file.
